98 Fun Facts About Honey

Honey is sweet mainly because of high concentrations of which two sugars?

Fructose and glucose make up 85-95% of honey's sugars, because enzymes the bees add split the sucrose in nectar into those two simpler sugars.

Besides floral nectar, honey bees also make honey from the sugary secretions of which insects?

Aphids and other sap-sucking insects excrete a sugary liquid called honeydew, and ants prize it so much that they guard aphid herds from predators and stroke them to 'milk' it.

What shape are the cells of a honeycomb?

Hexagonal cells tile with no gaps and need the least wall for the space they enclose, an ancient hunch that mathematician Thomas Hales finally proved in 1999.

Properly stored honey resists spoiling mainly because of which two properties?

High sugar concentration and acidity do it: with under 20% water, honey pulls moisture out of microbes by osmosis, and a pH of roughly 3.2 to 4.5 stops most of the rest.

Cuevas de la Araña, whose prehistoric rock art shows a figure raiding a wild bees' nest, is in which country?

Spain's rock shelters near Bicorp, Valencia, hold the scene, found in 1920; it was long dated to about 8,000 years ago, though some researchers now argue it is nearer 5,000.

Honey traces up to 5,500 years old, hailed as the world's oldest, came from a tomb in which Caucasus-region country?

Georgia's find came in 2003, when Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline work uncovered a noblewoman's tomb stocked with linden, berry and meadow-flower honeys for the afterlife.

As of 2023, which country produces the most honey, roughly a quarter of the world's total?

China harvests about four times as much honey as second-placed Turkey, and after the US hit its cheap exports with steep anti-dumping duties in 2001, smugglers took to relabelling Chinese honey as another country's.

A forager honey bee carries nectar home in which part of her body?

A second, separate stomach called the crop holds about 40 mg of nectar, and filling it can take visits to more than a thousand flowers; the leg baskets carry pollen.

Honey bees survive winter by clustering around the queen and making heat in what way?

Shivering their flight muscles without moving the wings lets workers generate heat, keeping the centre of the winter cluster as warm as 34 °C.

Fresh nectar is mostly water, so how do honey bees thicken it into honey inside the hive?

Fanning it with their wings evaporates the water: nectar arrives at 70-80% water and is capped with wax only once it is down to about 18%.

Before removable frames, harvesting honey from a straw skep often meant doing what to the bees inside?

Killing the whole colony was often the price of a skep harvest, because the comb was fixed inside; keepers relied on early-summer swarms to restock.

Besides masking their alarm scent, how does smoke from a beekeeper's smoker help calm bees?

It triggers a feeding instinct: smoked bees gorge on honey, perhaps readying to flee a fire, and bees busy filling up are less inclined to sting.

Which American developed the movable-comb hive described in his 1853 book The Hive and the Honey-bee?

Lorenzo Langstroth built his hive around 'bee space', a gap of under a centimetre that bees leave open, so frames lift out without wrecking the comb.

Which scientist decoded the honey bee's waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize?

Karl von Frisch showed that the angle of a bee's waggle run on the comb matches the angle between the sun and the food, so her nestmates know which way to fly.

A honey bee's waggle dance traces out which shape?

A figure eight: the bee waggles along a straight run, circles back one way, repeats the run and circles back the other, and a longer run signals more distant food.

Which secretion, fed to selected larvae, causes them to develop into queens rather than workers?

Royal jelly goes to every larva for its first three days, but only future queens stay on it, and that diet turns an egg that could have been a worker into a queen.

Roughly how many eggs can a well-mated, well-fed queen honey bee lay in a day?

About 1,500 eggs a day, and as many as 2,000 at the spring peak, adds up to more than the queen's own body weight, so attendants feed and groom her around the clock.

Beeswax is produced by glands on which part of a worker bee's body?

The abdomen carries eight wax glands on its underside, which sweat out thin scales of wax in young workers and shrink once a bee starts foraging.

What is the resinous 'bee glue' that honey bees make from tree buds and sap called?

Propolis is plant resin worked with saliva and wax, which the bees use to seal cracks, smooth the hive's inner walls and keep out invaders.

Roughly how many species of bee are known, of which honey bees are only a small fraction?

About 20,000 species are known, and more than nine in ten are solitary bees, such as mason and leafcutter bees, that never build a colony.

The husbandry of stingless bees, practised by the Maya since pre-Columbian times, is known by what name?

Meliponiculture is the keeping of stingless bees, which store their honey in little pots of wax and plant resin rather than in comb; Maya keepers in Yucatán still practise it.

The alcoholic drink made by fermenting honey with water is called what?

Mead may be the most ancient alcoholic drink of all: 9,000-year-old Chinese pottery held traces of a honey, rice and fruit brew, and an American brewery has since recreated it from the lab analysis.

The 1920s Bee's Knees cocktail shakes honey and lemon juice with which spirit?

Gin is the base of a Bee's Knees, a 1920s sour sweetened with honey instead of sugar, a mix long said to have masked the taste of rough bathtub spirit.

Mānuka honey comes from a shrub that grows wild in south-east Australia and, most famously, which other country?

New Zealand's mānuka honey fetches such prices that rival beekeepers have had hives stolen, poisoned and vandalised in turf wars over the best stands of the shrub.

Hallucinogenic 'mad honey' from rhododendron nectar is produced mainly in Turkey and which other country?

In Nepal it is harvested from cliff nests of the giant honey bee and prized as much for its effects as its taste.

Allies of King Mithridates reportedly left toxic 'mad honey' in the path of which Roman general's army?

Pompey's troops reportedly ate honeycomb left along their route near the Black Sea and were cut down while helpless; Xenophon's Greeks had been floored by the same honey in 401 BCE.

Why should honey never be given to babies under one year old?

Risk of infant botulism: honey can carry bacterial spores that grow and make toxin in a baby's immature gut, so the advice is to wait until the first birthday.

An enzyme that bees add to nectar releases which antibacterial compound when honey is diluted?

Hydrogen peroxide comes from the bees' glucose oxidase, an enzyme that sits all but idle in thick, ripe honey and switches on only when the honey is watered down.

US honey colour is graded on which scale, from 0 ('water white') to over 114 ('dark amber')?

Pfund readings help set a honey's price and its fate: pale honeys fetch more and are sold for the table, while the darkest more often end up as an ingredient in factory food.

Which honey, from a tree of the southeastern US, is famous for not crystallising?

Tupelo honey comes from gum trees in the swamps along Florida's Apalachicola River, where keepers long parked their hives on raised 'bee barges' to catch a bloom that lasts only two or three weeks.

The 'honey' in the biblical 'land of milk and honey' was probably a syrup of which fruit?

Dates fit best: rabbinic texts read the honey as date syrup, and the Bible mentions bees' honey outright only twice, though a 3,000-year-old apiary has been dug up at Tel Rehov.

Which scripture has a chapter titled 'The Bee' that calls honey a drink 'in which there is healing for people'?

The Quran names its 16th chapter, an-Nahl, after the bee, and the verse helped make honey a staple remedy across the Islamic world.

Apples dipped in honey are eaten at which Jewish holiday to symbolise a sweet new year?

The custom was a medieval addition; some Sephardic tables also serve dates, pomegranates and a whole fish with the head intact.

How does Winnie-the-Pooh famously spell honey?

Hunny is what Pooh has written on his jars; taking one to Eeyore as a birthday present, he ate the lot on the way and handed over a 'Useful Pot' instead.

Which African birds lead humans to wild bee colonies to eat the leftover grubs and wax?

The family has 16 species; the birds are also reported to work with honey badgers.

In 2017 the bee mascot vanished from boxes of which breakfast cereal to highlight the decline of pollinators?

Honey Nut Cheerios dropped BuzzBee from its US and Canadian boxes while maker General Mills gave away wildflower seeds for buyers to plant.

Ottoman sultans once presented trays of which honey-soaked pastry to their Janissary troops each Ramadan?

Baklava left the palace kitchens on the 15th of Ramadan, one tray for every ten Janissaries, who paraded it back to barracks until the corps was disbanded in 1826.

In which bee ailment, first reported in 2006, do worker bees vanish and leave behind a queen, brood and full stores?

Colony collapse disorder leaves almost no dead bees near the hive, which is why British beekeepers nicknamed it Mary Celeste syndrome after the ship found sailing with nobody aboard.

A worker honey bee usually dies after stinging a person because her stinger has what feature?

It is barbed like a harpoon, so it lodges in thick skin such as a person's and tears out of the bee, killing her, whereas a bumblebee can sting again and again.

Why do beekeepers hand emptied comb back to the bees instead of melting it down?

Wax costs bees lots of honey, around seven or eight pounds of it for every pound of comb, so a ready-built frame lets the colony bank the next nectar flow straight away.

The Brachygastra of Central and South America are unusual among which group of insects because they make and store honey?

Wasps of this genus, nicknamed honey wasps, stockpile nectar in their paper nests to see the colony through lean spells.

Which fictional detective retires to the Sussex Downs to keep bees and writes a handbook on the queen?

Sherlock Holmes calls his 'Practical Handbook of Bee Culture' the magnum opus of his latter years, written while he watched the hives as he once watched criminal London.

Which sweetener became the most common adulterant in honey from the late 20th century?

Corn syrup is cheap, clear and nearly flavourless, but corn is a C4 plant, so a carbon-isotope test can expose its sugars once they pass about 7% of the jar.

Honey's ability to absorb moisture straight from the air is known by what term?

Hygroscopy is why bakers like honey, since it pulls in moisture and keeps cakes and bread soft, but an unsealed jar can take on enough water to start fermenting.

Creamed honey contains no cream: its smooth, spreadable texture comes from being packed with what?

Tiny sugar crystals, seeded on purpose, stop big gritty ones from forming, and because glucose crystals are white they also leave the honey paler than it was as a liquid.

Honey's sweetness hides an average pH of about 3.9, making it roughly as acidic as which drink?

Orange juice comes in at a pH of roughly 3.5 to 3.8, right beside honey, whose tang comes mostly from gluconic acid that an enzyme from the bees makes as the nectar ripens.

Which moorland honey sets like a jelly in the jar but turns runny again as soon as it is stirred?

Heather honey is thixotropic, a gel that liquefies only while stirred, so it refuses to spin out of the comb like other honeys and is pressed out instead, or simply sold in the comb.

Which Everest pioneer made his living as a beekeeper?

Edmund Hillary worked the family hives with his brother Rex, a trade that suited a climber because the bees kept him busy in summer and left his winters free for the mountains.

In Bee Movie (2007), which comedian voices Barry B. Benson, the bee who sues humanity for taking honey?

Jerry Seinfeld also co-wrote the film. Renée Zellweger voices Vanessa, the florist who tells Barry that humans sell honey and then helps him take the case to court.

In New England's custom of 'telling the bees', what was feared if a death in the household went unannounced?

The hives would empty, people believed, as the insects fled or died unless they were told the news. In 2022 the palace beekeeper duly informed Buckingham Palace's hives that Elizabeth II had died.

Which US state is nicknamed the Beehive State and puts a beehive at the centre of its flag?

Utah chose the beehive as a symbol of hard work, in keeping with its one-word state motto, 'Industry'. The honey bee is also the official state insect.

In the Book of Judges, Samson finds bees and honey inside the carcass of which animal he had killed?

A lion he had killed with his bare hands became a nest for bees. Samson turned the find into a riddle that the Philistine guests at his wedding feast could not solve on their own.

What name is given to male honey bees, which have no stinger and gather no nectar or pollen?

Drones exist only to mate with a young queen, and often die in the act. Workers drive the survivors out of the hive in autumn, when they have become extra mouths to feed.

Honey that has turned solid and grainy in the jar can be made runny again by doing what?

Gently warming it returns set honey to a liquid state. Too much heat is the danger, since honey darkens and then caramelises if it gets hot enough.

Which French ruler had golden bees embroidered on his coronation mantle in place of the Bourbon fleur-de-lis?

Napoleon took the emblem from golden insects found in the tomb of Childeric I, a fifth-century Frankish king. The bees tied his new empire to a dynasty far older than the Bourbons.

Hot honey, the pizza drizzle popularised by a Brooklyn pizzeria worker in 2010, is honey infused with what?

Chili peppers give the honey a slow-building kick. Mike Kurtz began drizzling his homemade version over pizzas at Paulie Gee's in Greenpoint, and Mike's Hot Honey grew from there.

Japanese honey bees defend their nest from giant hornets by mobbing each invader in a tight ball and doing what?

Overheating it works because the bees can stand slightly more heat than the hornet. Hundreds vibrate together until the ball reaches about 46 °C, and the heat and trapped carbon dioxide kill the intruder.

Which New Testament preacher is described as wearing camel's hair and living on locusts and wild honey?

John the Baptist preached beside the River Jordan, where he baptised Jesus. Mark's Gospel records the sparse diet along with the leather belt he wore around his waist.

Honey is ruled out by which diet, whose founding society excluded it by name in a manifesto?

Vegan diets exclude honey because it is taken from animals, a line the Vegan Society drew in its founding manifesto. Vegetarians, by contrast, generally eat it.

Which actor played the inventor Wayne Szalinski in the 1989 Disney comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids?

Rick Moranis was cast although the script had been written with Chevy Chase in mind. His character's machine shrinks the children to a quarter of an inch tall.

What is the proper term for a site where a beekeeper's hives are kept, sometimes called a bee yard?

Apiary can describe anything from one garden hive to a commercial site, in town or country. Its keepers are formally known as apiarists.

Which singer debuted at number one in the US in 1997 with 'Honey', the lead single from Butterfly?

Mariah Carey made 'Honey' her third single to enter the Billboard Hot 100 at the top, a record at the time. It stayed there for three weeks.

Reliefs about 4,400 years old, showing workers blowing smoke into hives to take honeycomb, survive in which country?

Egypt's reliefs, in a temple of the pharaoh Nyuserre, show a trick beekeepers still use. Jars of honey were later placed in the tombs of pharaohs such as Tutankhamun.

Honey bees carry pollen back to the hive packed into 'baskets' on which part of the body?

Hind legs each carry a polished hollow fringed with hairs, called a corbicula. The bee brushes pollen backwards from her head and body and presses it in.

Which chewy confection, a speciality of Montélimar in France, is made by whipping honey into beaten egg whites?

Nougat recipes first appear in Middle Eastern cookbooks of the Middle Ages. The French town made the sweet famous only in the 19th century.

Which US president had the White House kitchen brew a honey ale using honey from a South Lawn beehive?

Barack Obama paid for the homebrewing kit himself in 2011. White House Honey Ale is the first beer known to have been brewed in the building.

Which term describes an old honey bee queen and most of her workers flying off to found a new nest?

Swarming is how a honey bee community reproduces. About two-thirds of the workers depart with the old queen, and a daughter queen inherits the original hive.

Which pop group's 1974 song 'Honey, Honey' is sung by Amanda Seyfried in the 2008 film Mamma Mia!?

ABBA put the song on Waterloo, the album named after their Eurovision winner. Its Swedish version was the last thing the group officially recorded in their own language.

Which purple-flowered plant, grown for its scented essential oil, also yields a premium Mediterranean honey?

Lavender flowers give abundant nectar, and the honey is marketed worldwide as a premium product. Cooks also use the plant to scent custards, flans and sorbets.

Which girl's name comes from the Greek word for honey bee and belonged to a nymph who nursed Zeus?

Melissa fed the baby god honey instead of milk, in one telling of the myth. The Greek word for the insect in turn comes from meli, meaning honey.

Medical-grade honey products are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for treating which minor problems?

Wounds and burns are the uses the agency has cleared. Early evidence suggests partial-thickness burns heal four to five days sooner under honey than under other dressings.

Nearly half of America's beehives are trucked to California each February to pollinate which crop?

Almonds draw over a million hives to California's orchards in the world's largest managed pollination event. Most varieties cannot set a crop with their own pollen.

So-called killer bees descend from African honey bees that escaped a breeding experiment in which country in 1957?

Brazil had imported the African bees a year earlier to raise honey yields. Twenty-six queens and their followers got out near São Paulo, and their hybrid offspring reached Texas in 1990.

Which rainforest mammal of Central and South America, a relative of raccoons, is also known as the honey bear?

Kinkajou pets avidly eat honey, hence the name, though wild ones are seldom recorded doing so. The species has a long, extendable tongue and a tail that can grip branches.

Besides bees, which insects store a honey-like liquid in the swollen bodies of living workers called repletes?

Ants of several kinds turn chosen workers into living larders that hang from the nest ceiling. Nestmates stroke them to release a drink when food is scarce.

Which whisky liqueur, linked by legend to Bonnie Prince Charlie, is sweetened with honey and flavoured with herbs?

Drambuie's recipe was, by MacKinnon clan legend, the prince's reward to a Skye captain who sheltered him after the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

Honey bees can see ultraviolet light, but which colour can they not tell apart from black?

Red falls outside a bee's range because its vision is shifted towards the ultraviolet end of the spectrum. Many flowers carry ultraviolet patterns that bees use to find them.

A honey extractor, invented in 1865, empties the comb without crushing it by relying on what?

Centrifugal force flings the honey out of the spinning frames and leaves the comb intact, so the bees can refill it. Franz Hruschka, a former Austrian army officer, built the first one.

Mount Hymettus, long noted for its thyme honey, rises beside which European capital city?

Athens spreads right up to the mountain, whose ridge then runs 16 km south towards the Saronic Gulf.

Oxymel, a medicinal drink prescribed since ancient times, is a mixture of honey and which sour liquid?

Vinegar is in the name: oxymel joins the ancient Greek words for acid and honey. Pharmacists were still listing the sweet-and-sour syrup as a medicine in the Renaissance.

Which English word for a smooth, sweet-sounding voice comes from the Latin for 'flowing like honey'?

Mellifluous joins mel, the Latin for honey, to the verb meaning to flow. Its near-twin melliferous describes plants that give bees the nectar or pollen they need.

In computer security, a 'honeypot' is which kind of system on a network?

A decoy for attackers looks like a real target but is isolated and watched. Defenders use it to distract intruders from machines that matter and to study how they work.

Tej, a honey wine flavoured with the leaves of the gesho shrub, is the national drink of which country?

Ethiopia's tej is mostly brewed at home from just honey, water and gesho. It is traditionally poured from a flask-like bottle called a berele.

Leatherwood honey comes from a rainforest tree that grows wild only on which island?

Tasmania's western forests are the leatherwood's only home. Its honey is listed in the Slow Food movement's Ark of Taste, a catalogue of foods worth protecting.

Which biblical prophetess and judge, who summoned Barak to battle, has a Hebrew name meaning 'bee'?

Deborah is the only female judge named in the Hebrew Bible. She gave her rulings beneath a palm tree, and a victory song in her name may be among its oldest passages.

A queen excluder keeps the queen bee out of a hive's honey boxes by exploiting which trait of hers?

Her larger size stops her squeezing through a grid whose gaps are about four millimetres wide, while workers pass freely. No eggs end up among the honey as a result.

Which crop, also ground into flour for Japanese soba noodles, gives a dark, strong and aromatic honey?

Buckwheat belongs to the knotweed family and is grown for its grain-like seeds, so it is not a cereal at all. Its nectar makes a notably dark honey.

Which American poet, daughter of a bumblebee expert, kept hives in Devon and wrote a sequence of bee poems?

Sylvia Plath took up beekeeping with Ted Hughes in 1962, and it became the subject of many of her poems. Her father Otto, a Boston University biologist, had published a book on bumblebees in 1934.

Which external parasite, a carrier of at least five bee viruses, is among the world's most damaging honey bee pests?

Varroa mite numbers were once confined to the Asian honey bee. The parasite then switched hosts to the western honey bee, which it weakens as it feeds and passes on disease.

Which Roman poet devoted the fourth book of his farming poem, the Georgics, to the life of bees?

Virgil holds up the hive as a model for human society, its members devoted to their ruler and to the common good. In his telling the bees serve a king, not a queen.

What do beekeepers call the removable boxes of frames, stacked on a hive, where bees store honey for harvest?

Supers each hold up to ten hanging frames on which the bees build comb. When nectar is plentiful, a keeper may stack several on one hive to give the bees enough room.

The honey badger, which often raids beehives for larvae and honey, is also known by which other name?

Ratel may come from a Dutch word for rattle or from raat, meaning honeycomb; nobody is sure. The animal is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family in Africa.

Which remote Pacific island, settled by the Bounty mutineers, exports honey from famously disease-free bees?

Pitcairn's honey is a protected monopoly, sold as far away as the United Kingdom. A British aid programme trained the island's beekeepers in 1998.

World Bee Day, 20 May, was proposed to the United Nations by which country, home of beekeeping pioneer Anton Janša?

Slovenia chose the day on which Janša was baptised in 1734. He taught beekeeping at the Habsburg court in Vienna, although he had trained as a painter.

Which bishop of Milan became a patron of beekeepers after bees reportedly settled on his face in the cradle?

Ambrose's father took the drop of honey the bees left behind as a sign that his son would grow up a sweet-tongued speaker. Hives often appear in images of him.

At the Buddhist festival Madhu Purnima, gifts of honey recall which animal's offering of a honeycomb to the Buddha?

A monkey brought the honeycomb while an elephant brought fruit, the story goes, as the Buddha stayed alone in the forest. The festival is kept in Bangladesh and by the Mon people of Thailand.

Black locust trees are the true source of a renowned European honey sold under which other tree's name?

Acacia honey owes its label to the tree's scientific name, Robinia pseudoacacia. The blossom lasts only about ten days, so the crop is unreliable from one year to the next.

Which Swiss actress played Honey Ryder, who walks out of the sea in the first James Bond film, Dr. No?

Ursula Andress had such a heavy accent that her lines were dubbed by Nikki van der Zyl. Her entrance from the surf, shells in hand, is still counted a classic Bond scene.